3 ms·

It's a regular 2.5" hard drive, but the motherboard has a USB <> SATA bridge and some glue logic on it already, probably to save space or costs. [0] There's no

It's a regular 2.5" hard drive, but the motherboard has a USB <> SATA bridge and some glue logic on it already, probably to save space or costs. [0] There's no SATA connector so you can't salvage the drive or the enclosure. But there are SATA test points so you could wire it that way in theory. [1] [2] Toshiba does the same, I found out the hard way after prying open one of them to salvage a hard drive for my PS4 [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP4l_L81NKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP4l_L81NKw [1] https://forum.acelaboratory.com/download/file.php?id=999&mode=view https://forum.acelaboratory.com/download/file.php?id=999&mod... [2] https://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopic.php?t=9174 https://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopic.php?t=9174

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
In the 3.5" space, "shucking" the enclosures off desktop USB storage devices almost always reveals a SATA 3.5" hard drive. Kind of surprising that the drive control board in the Passport has the USB connector built right in. It makes me wonder a few things: 1. What are volumes like for 2.5" spinning rust drives? I understand that the vast majority of 3.5" drives go into servers, desktops, or storage devices where they operate on a SATA bus, so the small volume of USB drives are most cheaply made with a housing that uses the economies of scale of that industry and adds a USB conversion motherboard. A decade ago, I would have said most 2.5" drives are used with SATA connectors in laptops, but who's buying laptops that don't use solid state storage anymore? 2. What's the cost difference for a drive control board with optional pads for both SATA and USB, only one installed at a time, vs one that only supports SATA? 3. Can you pull off the control board and replace it with one from the same lineup that uses SATA, like you would in a data recovery operation where some IC on the board burned out? Or is the mechanical component also specialized?

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

In the 3.5" space, "shucking" the enclosures off desktop USB storage devices almost always reveals a SATA 3.5" hard drive. Kind of surprising that the drive control board in the Passport has the USB connector built right in. It makes me wonder a few things: 1. What are volumes like for 2.5" spinning rust drives? I understand that the vast majority of 3.5" drives go into servers, desktops, or storage devices where they operate on a SATA bus, so the small volume of USB drives are most cheaply made with a housing that uses the economies of scale of that industry and adds a USB conversion motherboard. A decade ago, I would have said most 2.5" drives are used with SATA connectors in laptops, but who's buying laptops that don't use solid state storage anymore? 2. What's the cost difference for a drive control board with optional pads for both SATA and USB, only one installed at a time, vs one that only supports SATA? 3. Can you pull off the control board and replace it with one from the same lineup that uses SATA, like you would in a data recovery operation where some IC on the board burned out? Or is the mechanical component also specialized?